Price of Oil Crushes Liquid Transportation Fuels–Renewable and Not — Now What?

“Europe should promote the development of home-grown alternatives to imported oil and gas,” according to former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was Danish Prime Minister from November 2001 to April 2009 in an interview with Bloomberg’s Ewa Krukowska about Russian domination of European energy resources. “Wind and solar are well-known success stories but I’d also point to biofuels as an example of an alternative energy source with a lot of potential.”

In the US, in a two-part series, Advanced Biofuels USA correspondent Robert Kozak identifies the same concerns for energy security and the same solution–development of home-grown alternatives.

In addition, his analyses of the effect of low oil prices on the liquid transportation fuels industry and the potential for a reinvigorated US shale oil/gas industry with and without government subsidies reflects this growing international appreciation that we are at a crossroads, at a moment when the energy choices we make will have far-reaching consequences.

Either we will continue in an energy resource system where the energy czars have their boots on the necks of importing countries; or we grab the reins of freedom to become self-sustaining. Either we continue to pollute our air and water to the point that unrest threatens or we use the technologies that science gives us to reverse our harmful stewardship of the planet.

In Part 1 of the series, Why Oil Is Cheap in October 2015, Kozak points out that the bottom fell out of business-as-usual in the oil industry not only due to oversupply, but due to that oversupply being offered at below market prices to finance continued conflict in the Middle East.

In Part 2, “After the Fall: Rebuilding US Liquid Fuel Production – Invest in Our Land or the Shale Oil Fields?” Kozak reviews recent experts’ predictions about the trajectory of oil prices, analyses how they went wrong and the current situation of debt and decline in the US shale oil/gas industry.In the US, our immediate options are clear: Do we bail out the banks and financial institutions that bet on the fossil fuel sector and lost; or do we take this opportunity to replace dirty, polluting, high GHG fuels with clean, renewable sustainable ones?

If the American renewable transportation fuels industry can succeed while the US shale oil industry is collapsing, it seems that the way forward to American liquid fuel independence and lower GHGs is through the land of America – biofuels and not shale oil.

Across the globe, other countries are facing similar choices. Sometimes life and death choices related to sources of energy and the systems we have build to create/extract, deliver and use them.

Let’s put our financial resources to work to avoid pollution, build cleaner fuels, and give the world less reason to suffer due to energy security failures.